British Government accused of plagiarism over Iraq dossier

PM - Friday, 7 February , 2003 00:00:00

Reporter: Matt Peacock

MARK COLVIN: In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair's office has been trying to defend itself after it emerged that a dossier it released at the weekend on Iraq's weapons program included material plagiarised from a foreign policy magazine.

The dossier, published on the Downing Street website, describes what it calls Iraq's "infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation".

But a report on London's Channel Four showed how the document was plagiarised from an article written by a Californian postgraduate student, complete even with grammatical errors and typographical mistakes.

Matt Peacock reports.

MATT PEACOCK: The Downing Street document was posted on its website with little fanfare at the weekend, and it gave the impression of being culled from the latest intelligence available to the Government from its various by-agencies.

Its release appeared to be timed carefully in the run-up to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell's address to the United Nations. But according to Channel Four, most of the 19-page document has been copied from three different articles, one of them by a postgraduate student at Monterey in California, Ibrahim al-Marashi.

His article was published last September in the small journal, The Middle East Review of International Affairs. Whole slabs of the website document seemed to have been copied verbatim. For example, the six paragraph section headed 'Saddam's Special Security Organisation' is reproduced word for word.

Indeed, where changes to the original have been made, they've apparently been designed to spice up the content into something a little more sinister. So, "monitoring foreign embassies" becomes "spying" on them. "Aiding opposition groups" becomes "supporting terrorist organisations". At one point the Downing Street website even reproduces a sentence with the incorrect placement of a comma, in the same spot as it is in the original.

Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, is outraged.

DAN PLESCH: This document is clearly presented to the British public as a product of British intelligence, and it clearly is nothing of the kind. I think it should be compared with the sort of deceit or scandal we had over Mrs Blair's affairs. This is an infinitely more serious matter.

This appears to be obsolete academic analysis dressed up and presented as the best MI6 and our other international partners can produce on Saddam. The word "scandalous" is I think greatly overused in our political life, but it certainly applies to this.

MATT PEACOCK: Earlier this week, a leaked document which was from British defence intelligence experts flatly contradicted the Downing Street assertion that Iraq and Al Qaeda were connected. Dan Plesch suspects that the apparent plagiarism in this case, may have occurred because British intelligence agencies won't provide the kind of information that Mr Blair's office has been seeking.

DAN PLESCH: One has to ask, who in Government knew what the original source materials were? I mean, whether or not some officials in Downing Street were led to believe by other officials that they were actually being presented with official material, or the other way around, whether in fact MI6, we've heard various remarks about what MI6 has been reluctant to take part in, in terms of the Government's propaganda, whether in fact the intelligence services refused to provide this sort of material, or the material they produced didn't make the Government's case. There was a last minute scurrying to produce something else.

MATT PEACOCK: War propaganda is nothing new for the British state, as anyone who's monitored events, say, in Northern Ireland can tell you. But usually at least, it's original. If the charge of plagiarism from a student sticks, then the incident will yet further weaken public confidence over an imminent war which the Prime Minister, but few others in his Party, appears determined to prosecute.